When Life Is a Roll of the Dice

Published: July 8, 2004

(Page 2 of 2)

''I have friends all over the planet,'' he said when I called him on the telephone. (I'll admit I was nervous. What if he turned out to be a mean old jerk, instead of the funny player with a knack for words I had known for so many months? But it was fine. The only downside is that he now e-mails me political jokes.) ''Will I meet them? Maybe not. But I can chat with someone in Russia, or in Finland. I can feel that I am part of the world out there, and not living in a small town in Washington State.''

Terry Cole, the supervisor for the Wastewater Treatment Department for Findlay, Ohio, told me he used to play chess at itsyourturn.com but found that the backgammon players were more talkative, so he switched.

''Maybe that's because it's less of a cutthroat group than the chess players,'' said Mr. Cole, who is 49. In 2000, he started playing with a woman named Kim in England. ''She'd say something funny, and then I would say something, and we just seemed to get along,'' Mr. Cole said.

The woman from England then got on the phone. The couple met when she traveled to the United States in 2001 and were married in 2002; their son, Brandon, was born last July.

''We started out with a bit of general chit-chat, really,'' said Mrs. Cole, 45. ''We started to tell each other everything. And he told me all sorts of serious things, like one of the great regrets he had in his life was that he never had children. And we met. And my family thought I was crazy. And well, we are not young. But here we are.''

And they owe it to It's Your Turn, the brainchild of Patrick Chu, who until six years ago worked in the computer industry. Mr. Chu and a colleague used to play chess during lulls in the workday but came to feel that it looked unprofessional to have a chessboard set up in the middle of their office. They searched for a Web site so they could play sub rosa, but didn't find one they liked.

So Mr. Chu, who had long tired of the braggadocio and Hollywood style of Silicon Valley, quit his job, moved to Durham, N.C. (he graduated from Duke University in 1988 and loved the area), and started It's Your Turn, a site that offers chess, backgammon and other games. Members pay $17.95 for a six-month subscription and can play up to 200 simultaneous games. Mr. Chu said it pays the rent.

Like dealers of another sort, Mr. Chu only samples the merchandise to make sure it's good. For that matter, ''none of my friends play,'' he said. ''Not even my fiancée.''

Another site, DailyGammon, was founded by Jordan Lampe, a 34-year-old who works at a hedge fund in New York and limited himself to the briefest of e-mail correspondence with me. His mother, Linda Lampe, who helped design the Web site, told me that her son had designed a version of backgammon for hand-held devices.

''I understand how it becomes a bit obsessive,'' she said. I asked her how often she played.

''Oh, every day,'' Mrs. Lampe said.

How many times a day?

''I am too embarrassed to say,'' she said.

After spending one spring Sunday playing for four hours, I realized that maybe I, too, had an embarrassing problem. Dr. Eric Hollander, the director of the Compulsive, Impulsive, and Anxiety Disorders Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, told me that I was simply practicing a form of self-medication.

''Everyone has their own optimal level of arousal,'' he said. ''If you're understimulated, you're bored, and if you are overstimulated, you're uncomfortable. This is a way of regulating that process.''

Dr. Hollander said he regulates his own mental processes.

''I recently got a BlackBerry, and I have this compulsive e-mail checking now,'' he said.

The addict, of course, tries to rationalize a habit by showing that there are others with bigger problems. In my case, I chose to rationalize by comparing myself with Stefan Fatsis, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who took a year out of his career to play on the pro Scrabble circuit and wrote a book, ''Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), about his experience.

I am a normal person with a rich, complex and fulfilling life, I told Mr. Fatsis, who made sympathetic uh-huh noises and said that he, too, had a little problem with online backgammon.

So what was our deal?

''The first reason is this,'' he said. ''You are not as normal as you think you are.''

Perhaps.

''The second, larger reason is that there is something that compels us toward these complex pastimes,'' he continued. ''The thing I discovered was that my mind was built in such a way that it needed to have this impossibly complex challenge that is outside the mainstream of what I do on a daily basis.''

(Of course, his journey was a bit more complex than mine. For years, he spent several hours a week memorizing thousands of Scrabble-approved words that were often meaningless to him because he didn't need to know their definitions. I, on the other hand, spent a half-hour memorizing the odds that I will roll a 1, or double 6's. O.K., I also bought four books on backgammon. But I only read two of them.)

Some people justify their obsessive playing by considering it a form of self-improvement, he said.

''Then again, when you're sitting there playing 70 simultaneous games of online backgammon, you're not thinking, oh gee, this is going to make me a better person,'' Mr. Fatsis said. ''It's a drug addiction without the drug.''

We said goodbye. But not before making a promise to play backgammon sometime.

Photos: DICE READY -- Hank Hassan says he has ''friends all over the planet.'' (Photo by Jeff T. Green for The New York Times); PARTNERS -- Terry and Kim Cole (with son, Brandon) met playing online. (Photo by J.D. Pooley for The New York Times); FOUNDER -- Patrick Chu of Durham, N.C., started It's Your Turn, a Web site that offers chess, backgammon and other games. (Photo by Jenny Warburg for The New York Times)(pg. G5) (Illustration by Andy Chen)(pg. G1)